The problem with the story of the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire is that so much of what we think we know about this story just is not so. Start with the famous image published by Time magazine referenced above. It is a picture of a fire on the Cuyahoga, but its not a picture of the fable 1969 fire. Rather, it’s from a fire 17 years earlier.
The reality is that the 1969 Cuyahoga fire was not a symbol of how bad conditions on the nation’s rivers could become, but how bad they had once been. The 1969 fire was not the first time an industrial river in the United States had caught on fire, but the last. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th century, river fires were common. There were at least 13 on the Cuyahoga alone, but rivers in Baltimore, Detroit, Buffalo, Philadelphia, and elsewhere had fires as well.